Ridley Scott set up Russell Crowe for an Oscar and relaunched
the Hollywood swords-and-sandals epic with Gladiator, but
can he sweep back in and fortify the crumbling parapets?
High-priced failures such as Troy and Alexander have
left the historical genre looking pretty vulnerable to the worst
sort of Hollywood slash-and-burn predator: the studio
accountant.

In Kingdom of Heaven, the veteran English director's new
$US130 million ($168 million) epic about knights, chivalry and the
Crusades, he is pinning his hopes on the svelte shoulders of
Orlando Bloom. The young actor is joined by a regiment of old
armoured war horses such as Jeremy Irons, Liam Neeson and Brendan
Gleeson. But adding knights won't necessarily buy off the studio
money men; just look at last year's epic failure, King Arthur.

But then, Sir Ridley is a knight himself.

He came to fame creating sci-fi reality in films such as
Alien and Blade Runner.

At this stage of his career he seems immersed in non-fiction,
apart from amusing excursions like his 2001 Hannibal Lecter
film.

Many of his precise historical re-creations have been set around
the Mediterranean, North Africa and the Middle East: Gladiator,
Black Hawk Down and a 19th-century Barbary Coast project,
Tripoli, which is on hold.

He tends to film them in Morocco, so conjuring up the Jerusalem
of the Crusades is no great stretch. Scott and his Kingdom
screenwriter, William Monahan, originally got together to make
Tripoli.

"It was going to be a Russell Crowe project and, again, it was
going to be another political, historical venue," he says.

"But I had always wanted to do a film about knights or cowboys
because they are both such iconographic figures. Bill has this
wonderful way of being able to extract a brilliant story from the
pages of antiquity. And he zeroed in on this marvellous period of
uneasy peace between the second and third crusades."

The subject matter of Kingdom, the passions aroused by
Christian knights trying to recover the Holy Land from the Muslims,
takes Scott onto the turf of the religious epic. Give or take 12
centuries, it is the same turf that Mel Gibson so successfully
exploited in The Passion of the Christ.

After Passion, Jerusalem seems to have supplanted ancient
Rome (Gladiator), Troy and Babylon (Alexander) as the
happening city of the epic re-creation movie. Calvary has become as
much a fixture in these movies as Central Park is in Woody Allen
films. Jerusalem is still big walls and earth-toned, as it was in
Gibson's movie, but in Scott's 12th-century epic the Christians are
running the place.

Scott was not trying to do a celluloid religious tract, so his
film is more nuanced than Gibson's sermon. For one thing, there is
no "good" religion or "bad" religion as in Gibson's film; Scott
treats Muslims with more even-handedness than Gibson treated
Jews.

The central action in Kingdom of Heaven is triggered by
an ill-behaved Christian group, the Knights Templar, who are so
zealous about wanting to kick some Muslim butt they overlook that
the Muslim Saracens have a bigger, better army. They attack a
civilian Saracen caravan and kill, among others, the sister of the
legendary Saracen leader, Saladin, who lays siege to Jerusalem in
response.

It would be overstating things to say that Oscar-nominated Scott
has been dogged by controversy with the Kingdom of Heaven
project. But his determination not to portray the Crusades in
spaghetti-western terms, as simplistic good guys and bad guys, has
prompted some squeals of outrage from the fundamentalist right, who
are used to historical religious issues being portrayed in
comfortingly pro-Christian terms.

Scott's portrayal of Saladin (1137-1193) is fairly positive -
the film portrays Saladin and Edward Norton's ailing Christian king
of Jerusalem, Baldwin IV (1160-1185), as desperately trying to
avoid war.

As portrayed by Scott, Saladin and Baldwin IV, who wears a mask
and robes to cover the effects of leprosy, have a kind of tacit
understanding that war would be the worst outcome. Each has to
contend with his own batch of throne-room crazies.

However, Scott's sympathetic depiction of Saladin has produced a
certain amount of apoplexy among some British academics. One reason
is that contemporary Arab dictators such as Saddam Hussein have
used Saladin's victories over the West as a rallying point for
their own purposes.

Jonathan Riley-Smith, a professor of ecclesiastical history at
Cambridge, went so far as to describe Scott's script as "Osama bin
Laden's version of history ... it will fuel the Islamic
fundamentalists". Not only had Saddam Hussein tried to cash in on
Saladin's legacy, but so too had the late Syrian dictator Hafez
al-Assad. The logic is hard to follow, since neither Hussein or
Assad were Islamic fundamentalists; they were just tyrants.

Riley-Smith said it was all the fault of 19th-century author Sir
Walter Scott.

His view of the Crusades in his book, The Talisman,
suggested the Saracens were a sophisticated bunch and a lot of the
Crusaders were zealots. Riley-Smith didn't make a big deal of the
author and director's shared surname, but upstanding 21st-century
Christian conspiracy theorists probably will.

The contemporary Ridley was also fairly meticulous about casting
his Muslim characters. Rather than opting for some Hollywood
dark-skinned type such as Andy Garcia or Antonio Banderas to play
Saladin, Scott went for a distinguished, classical Syrian actor,
Ghassan Massoud. Given that Irish-born Neeson and Brit Bloom play
Frenchmen in the movie, Scott clearly took extra care with his
Muslim characters.

"There is a contemporary nuance, which I guess is what has upset
a lot of people," Scott says. "In our story you've got wise leaders
of both the Muslims and the Christians doing their best to keep the
peace, until they are thwarted by religious zealots.

"So it's quite even-handed. But, of course, the bully pulpit
critics who came out and attacked the film hadn't read the script,
couldn't have seen the film because it wasn't made, but [looked]
for a quick headline.

"My response to these historians was simply this: 'You haven't
seen the film, you haven't read the script, yet you're giving
opinions saying that it is rubbish. Sounds to me you just want your
name in the paper saying something stupid.

What sort of historian are you?'"

Perhaps only Scott could get away with waving aside the
cinematic collapse of Troy and Alexander - films
featuring top directors such as Wolfgang Petersen and Oliver Stone
- because he hasn't "seen either of them".

He talks about his last historical epic, Gladiator,
secure in the knowledge that it was the first of the new
sword-and-sandals epics and the most successful of other mainstream
entries in the genre. You probably have to leave aside The
Passion of the Christ, because it was received partly as a
religious experience, and Pirates of the Caribbean, which had an
ardent following as a Disney theme-park ride.

"Modern directors love the idea of doing epics," he says.
"They're the sort of films that great Hollywood directors have done
since the beginning of movies. It puts you in the class with Cecil
B. DeMille.

"I've always liked doing movies about worlds removed from our
own. So I have to decide what I am going to do and how the hell I
am going to do it. So if people say to me, 'Yes, but these other
epics have failed', I have to say, 'Yes, but I didn't make those
films'."